The power of a digital detox and the value of committee volunteering

For Carrie Kruse, CPA, CGMA, mental clarity is one goal of going on vacation. Also, Kruse likes to be tested while away from her job as economic development administrator for Iowa’s capital city, Des Moines. In Kruse’s words, she loves “to be challenged in ways outside of my professional sphere.” Recently, that challenge was a hike of more than 100 mountainous miles in Europe.

That challenge also meant she unplugged from work for two weeks, which helped to ensure she returned to Iowa refreshed.

This conversation is the first of a three-episode road trip to the Midwest with a theme of summer travel and the importance of taking time away. Episodes with finance leaders in Nebraska and South Dakota are coming later in the summer.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• The particulars of Kruse’s economic development role.
• Why she says that Des Moines punches above its weight.
• The type of vacation Kruse takes depending on the time of year.
• How a recent trip to Europe underscored the importance of unplugging.
• The value of serving on the Government Performance and Accountability Committee.

Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:

— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Neil Amato at Neil.Amato@aicpa-cima.com.

Transcript

Neil Amato: Welcome back to the Journal of Accountancy podcast. This is Neil Amato on a personal Midwest swing. Taking the show on the road, we are in Des Moines, Iowa, the capital of Iowa. I’m with Carrie Kruse, a CPA who is economic development administrator with the city of Des Moines. Carrie, we’ve had you on the podcast before, the first appearance being, gosh, wow, now more than five years ago. Thank you for welcoming us to your city, and welcome to the podcast.

Carrie Kruse: Thank you and welcome to the city of Des Moines. We’re so excited to have you here.

Amato: Great. Tell me some about Des Moines. Is this where you grew up?

Kruse: It’s not where I grew up. I was born and raised here in Iowa. I grew up in a small town in the southwest corner of the state, only about 5,000 population. Where I grew up is a little different than the city of Des Moines. I have been in the Des Moines area since I graduated college.

Amato: As I said, you work in economic development for the city. By the way, we are recording downtown in the Des Moines Public Library. It’s a neat thing to me. You work in economic development for Des Moines. Tell me something about that role, which obviously by its title is not truly finance-specific.

Kruse: We’re not doing your traditional tax or audit services like a lot of CPAs do, but the role does include quite a bit of finance and accounting, which is a surprise to a lot of people. Our primary objective in the Office of Economic Development is to grow the local property tax base here for the city of Des Moines. We focus on working with local employers, helping them grow and expand in the city, increasing jobs.

We also work with them if they outgrow their space, helping them find new space or helping them build new space, ideally, is what we’re ultimately after, also trying to attract new companies to the city of Des Moines. We also work with a lot of our housing developers because jobs and housing are so closely connected, so making sure that we have a wide variety of affordability in housing and different housing products and different types across the city.

We work with a lot of property tax incentives to incentivize the types of development we want to see across the city. In doing that, we’re doing a lot of underwriting. We’re doing a lot of real estate finance. We’re also working a lot on municipal finance. With new development, we often have public improvements, roads, sewers, water lines that have to be installed, and so planning, programming, budgeting for all those things to happen and come together at the right time. Having that background in finance and accounting is tremendously helpful in that role.

Amato: It sounds like it. For me, it’s a place that is a lot greener than I thought, coming from North Carolina. It is a little more rolling than I thought. I thought it was just going to be pancake flat, and it’s not. What do you love about this city? You said you’ve been here since, basically, college, and clearly your job, you have to love it if you’re going to work in that role that you do, so what do you love about Des Moines?

Kruse: There’s so much to love about living and working here in the city of Des Moines. I think what a lot of people know us for is low cost of living, high-quality life, but I think the real secret sauce for the city of Des Moines is our super strong culture of philanthropy, and that’s all the way from entry-level college grads coming to the city that want to make the city a better place all the way up to your C-suite, CEOs, CFOs, that really care about the community and really give to a lot of the quality-of-life amenities that we have here in the city that we otherwise wouldn’t have. We really do punch above our weight, so to speak, when it comes to the quality-of-life stuff we have here in the city of Des Moines, and then our corporate giving is huge. Our companies, and the leaders at our local companies, really care, and it makes a huge difference.

Just a couple of examples of things we have that I think have been really fun and exciting over the years: Here in the last five or six years, we built the nation’s largest outdoor skate park. A lot of people don’t realize that we have that here in the city of Des Moines, but we hosted the Dew Tour. We had an Olympic-qualifying skateboard event here in downtown Des Moines. The park is right on the river, which is just a really fun atmosphere and location to be able to go and watch and partake in those big events.

We have over 800 miles of connected biking and walking trails in the city, which is pretty incredible. You can get almost anywhere and through most of our suburbs, all connected via bike trails, which I love because I’m an outdoor person that loves riding my bike across the city.

We have a wonderful Broadway facility. We have a really strong arts and culture. Almost every city in the metro gives a portion of hotel taxes back into an arts and culture nonprofit, and so the music festivals, the art festivals, different things we get to host here because the community cares about that stuff. It just makes Des Moines a special place.

I think the last thing I’ll say is we still have that small-town charm. It is rare to go anywhere in the city and not run into somebody you know, which for me, I love that. Some people may not like living in a place like that, but it really gives a great, strong sense of home.

Amato: Now the theme of the summer road trip, travel, unplugging, even someone who loves a place, like you love Des Moines, needs some time away, some time, I guess, seeing different things. Have you had recently any big summer travel?

Kruse: I just got back last week from two weeks off. I went to Western Europe. There were six of us total from the Des Moines area that traveled together. We went on the Tour du Mont Blanc hike. It’s a 170-kilometer hike, basically, around a mountain. You start in Chamonix, France, make your way through Italy, Switzerland, and back to France.

Amato: Wow. That sounds amazing. What to you, besides great hiking, great food, whatever, are the elements of a great week or two away?

Kruse: I always feel I have two very different types of vacations that I like to take away. In the winters, it gets really cold here in Des Moines, and so I love the escape to a warm beach and park it on a beach and have a very relaxing, unplugged time away. Then I also have a very opposite vacation that I like to take in the summers when it’s really hot, which is escape to the mountains, go hiking, be outside, super endurance-type challenge, usually is what I focus those vacations around.

I think it’s good to get both. You need time away from work. You need that time to really relax and unplug, and so I try to get that through one of my vacations, but I also love to be challenged in ways outside of my professional sphere. Having a reason to go visit another place but have some endurance challenge that just challenges my mind anew in different ways is another element to a vacation that I love to have.

Amato: Setting aside the particulars of a beach week or a mountain week, an adventure week, how does that time away make you feel both getting back to work but also maybe from a recharge standpoint?

Kruse: I think one of the most important elements to that time away, for me personally, is if you can truly get that digital detox. This last trip that I went on was international, so if I wanted access to my work email, I wasn’t going to be able to get it, so that helps.

Truly being able to confidently unplug, go away from your work, turn that phone on airplane mode, use that phone for a camera and that’s it, get away from the media, get away from your social media, I feel there’s so much mental clarity you can get from just getting a break from all the digital noise, which I think overwhelms and consumes our life on the regular basis when we’re in that regular work routine. That was one of the strongest elements to this most recent time that I had off was truly prioritizing what I’ll call a digital detox.

Amato: It is important. For some of us, it’s harder than others, for sure. How do you prepare to go on vacation, meaning, both yourself and then also with those work tasks that may need to be delegated or things communicated that you’re just going to be out of town and out of touch?

Kruse: I think one of the best things you can do to start in that process well before you leave on vacation is mentally commit to unplugging and being gone. In doing that, you’re forced to really prioritize, what is it that my team needs to know about? What is it my supervisors need to know about? What are the things that I truly need to address before I leave so I can leave and leave my team in a good place and have the confidence to be able to unplug.

The other thing that I’ve started doing more of recently that I hadn’t done in the past is building in some buffer time before I leave and buffer time when I get back, so at least a half a day on my last day of work so that, if things do pop up that I didn’t expect, I have that time set aside to deal with that before I leave. Just being able to wind down and feel good about leaving the office. I think having some buffer time before you leave is so important.

If you have the time, being able to build in some buffer time when you get home so you can get to the grocery store, restock the fridge, do your laundry, take care of all that stuff before you have to return back to the chaos of your regular life, it can just make such a difference in coming back and feeling truly refreshed, re-energized, have that mental clarity to jump right back in.

Amato: Back in March 2020, I mentioned that the first time we had you on the podcast was now more than five years ago. Obviously, things are a lot different than they were in March of 2020. That was one of our first podcast episodes during the pandemic. You said, “I’ve had my own policy of dressing for the day.” You don’t sit around in sweatpants, and you said that that helped you stay productive. One, you’re not working fully remote anymore. Tell me some about that and how you approach work in, I guess, more of a hybrid environment.

Kruse: I have the option to work up to two days from home per week in today’s environment. It’s oftentimes usually one, if I’m lucky. I am still doing the hybrid schedule and still very much dressing for the day, probably more so now than I was when we spoke five years ago, just because things can be quick to change. I might think I have a work-from-home day, but then something pops up, and it’s going to be a meeting that’s going to be far more productive in person.

Another benefit of living in Des Moines, our commute times are incredibly short, so 15 minutes I can be to the office from my house. I feel I want to dress for the day, but I also want to be prepared in case I need to get up and go and head to an in-person meeting unexpectedly, so still sticking to that.

Amato: I didn’t say it before, but you’re a member of the AICPA’s GPAC committee?

Kruse: Yes.

Amato: One, can you remind people what that acronym stands for? As a closing thought, as I guess you’re rolling off that committee this year, what has the time spent on it meant to you?

Kruse: So happy to talk about the GPAC committee. It stands for the Government Performance and Accountability Committee. We have about 12 members that sit on that committee that represent state level, federal level, local level governments, as well as educational institutions, and then we have one member from the Government Accountability Office as well. That committee is really focused on providing tools and resources to the government sector.

Serving on that committee has meant the world to me. I have gotten to meet colleagues from all across the country that I otherwise never would have gotten to meet and have learned that the challenges we have here in the city of Des Moines and local government are often not something new and unique that others aren’t experiencing as well, even in very different parts of the country.

To have that network of peers to be able to call upon and say, have you dealt with this, can you give me some recommendations or some suggestions, and having a whole team of people ready to jump up and help and brainstorm ideas — that part has been really incredible resource to me.

Then to be able to give back, I think, in the government sector, we don’t always have a lot of the same professional tools and resources that you might have in your public CPA firms with your traditional audit and tax practice. There’s just so much emphasis and focus in those areas. To have this committee that’s always putting out tools and resources and very relevant, up-to-date information to try to help our peers across the country and across the world really has meant a lot to be able to give back to the profession in that way, specifically into the government sector that always tugs on my heartstrings.

Amato: That’s great. I think it’s a great way to close. Again, Carrie, thank you for joining the JofA podcast. Thank you for your hospitality in the capital of Iowa, Des Moines.

Kruse: Thank you.